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March 7 2011 – No Mas Sangre (No More Blood), a social protest group that began life as a cartoon, took to the streets of Mexico City on a recent weekend. They were protesting what they see as a failed policy – President Felipe Calderon‘s campaign against the country’s drug cartels and organized crime. But how representative are they of the Mexican people?

John Ackerman’s blog -  and the Mexican Law Review

The two polls quoted in this video come from Buendia & Laredo, and Consulta Mitofsky.

With thanks to Jorge Buendia and John Ackerman.

This video was shot, produced and edited by Deborah Bonello.

Editorial assistant Ulises Escamilla Haro.

See last week;s edition of MRTV here.

Every now and again, a story finds you. For me, one of the most moving stories that found me during my time in Mexico was that about people from Central American who cross Mexico on their way to the United States as undocumented migrants. It was something I reported on frequently, and when Marc Silver, a British filmmaker, came to Mexico City looking to make a series of films about the issue for Amnesty International, I was thrilled he planned to focus on the issue.

Marc had Gael Garcia Bernal on board as his presenter, and has produced some excellent advocacy work. “Los Invisibles” (the invisibles) series is beautifully produced and shot, giving voice to a community rarely asked it’s opinion.

The tone of these videos is not journalistic – Silver and Bernal have a very strong point to make on behalf of Amnesty International. They tell the stories of this group of people excellently. As media budgets diminish, we’re likely to see a lot more of this sort of work fill the information space left.

On how he and Bernal were received when they were making the film, Silver said:

“We were received very warmly. It is not often anybody asks their opinion or story, so people were very keen to share their experiences with us. It seemed to be a very empowering experience for people to talk about the horrors of the journey because it’s almost like these are taboo topics that no-one wants to discuss at home because they don’t want to scare their families, particularly their mothers.”

The films were shot mainly on DSLR using the Canon EOS 7d with a Canon EF 50 mm F1.2L USM lens, and a Canon EF 14 mm F2.8L II USM lens.

Click on the video to see the first of the four films, and that link will also take you to the rest of the series.

Also, do check out another film in the making from Marc called “Who Is Dayani Cristal?”, which is about the quest to identify an anonymous body found in the Arizona desert whose only identifying feature is a tattoo reading ‘Dayani Cristal’. Part drama, part documentary, the film again features Gael García Bernal. See the trailer here.

The first, last and only time that I met the French-born filmmaker and photographer Christian Poveda was on 1 April of this year, when I interviewed him in an apartment he was renting in Mexico City while doing promotion for his film, La Vida Loca.

I’d seen the documentary the night before at a screening attended by Poveda, who fielded questions on why he chose to spend 16 months following members of El Salvador’s notoriously violent 18th Street gang with a video camera. It is a film that could well have brought him to his violent end.

Poveda was shot dead on Wednesday 4 September just outside San Salvador, the capital of El Salvador, where he lived. Sources say that the night before he was killed, Poveda confessed to being afraid and worried that the gangs were taking a turn for the worse, with a new crop of ever-more vicious leaders coming to the fore.

La Vida Loca is a groundbreaking documentary that shines a light onto the bleak lives of El Salvador’s Mara gangs. Poveda achieved unprecedented, long-term access to certain branches of the gangs and their daily lives in the capital.

I’m not one to speculate on who might be responsible for his death — the disorder, impunity and lawlessness in El Salvador means we might never know. But his murder is a terrible loss, not only to his friends, family and colleagues, but to the journalistic community in Latin America, which already suffers some of the highest rates of aggression and intimidation against members of the trade.

To Poveda, the young people who join las Maras were “victims of society”. He approached the gangs as a documentary filmmaker with an open mind and a lack of moral judgment.

As he said to me during our interview, he was of the opinion that “the majority are young boys that were abandoned at a very young age, and the fact that someone would come from another continent to spend time with them on a daily basis, filming and listening to them, for them that was something very important, that someone was paying attention.”

Many would disagree with Poveda’s assessment of the gangs that stretch across Central America to the United States. Poveda worked as a photojournalist in El Salvador during and after the 12-year-long civil war, which began in 1980. But the gangs really took on their current strength and size in the United States.

Gangs were formed by Salvadorans living on the streets of Los Angeles in the 1980s, many of who went to the US to escape the civil war ravaging El Salvador. When the peace accords that ended the war were signed in El Salvador in the early 1990s, huge numbers of gang members returned to the country, some of them by choice but most of them through deportation by US authorities. Many were sent back after completing prison sentences.

Although gangs did exist on a small scale in El Salvador before the mass return of migrants from the US, they only grew into the super-gangs they are today after the end of the civil war. The brutally violent groups have been connected with organized crime and other illegal activities across the Americas.

But however you view the gangs, Poveda did what good journalists do — he broadened the discussion, taking a new visual and journalistic angle on an issue that has become so black and white. As the United States continues to sweep the issue of immigration reform under the carpet and turn a blind eye to the repercussions of some of its policies on its smaller, poorer, weaker neighbours, Poveda put some of those realities up on cinema screens on both sides of the Atlantic for all to see.

Tragically, he paid the highest price for doing so.

La Vida Loca, which has been showing on the international film festival circuit, is coming up for commercial release in Mexico and France over the next two months. But the day after Poveda’s death, his producer Gustavo Angel was still trying to negotiate a US release for the film.

I can’t help feeling that if La Vida Loca isn’t seen by audiences within the United States, many of whom have never traveled south of the border, let alone as far south as Central America, we will miss an opportunity to advance the discussion surrounding America’s gang and immigration problems — issues that are inextricably linked.

Deborah Bonello is a blogger and video journalist MexicoReporter.com

www.MexicoReporter.com

This article was written for Index on Censorship.

At first glance, “Los Bastardos” seems a surprising film for a Mexican director to make.

The second movie from Amat Escalante, 30, is a disturbing fictional tale about 24 hours in the lives of two undocumented Mexican day laborers in Los Angeles.

The documentary style of Escalante’s storytelling, which uses two non-actors in the main roles, lulls the viewer into a false sense of complacency that comes to a traumatic and sudden end. The long, lingering shots, taken by a stationary camera, are reminiscent of films such as “Luz Silenciosa / Silent Light” by hot Mexican film talent Carlos Reygadas, who was an associate producer on “Los Bastardos” and also provided Escalante with what he calls “moral support.”

Given the debate raging in the United States over the rights of undocumented migrants, “Los Bastardos” could be accused of playing into the hands of the anti-immigration lobby.

After a day’s hard (illegal) labor, the lead characters Jesús and Fausto break into the house of a white, middle-class woman. OK, she’s too high on crack to really care that much. But why would Escalante _ the son of an American woman and a Mexican man who illegally crossed the border into the U.S. before Escalante was born _ want to portray his undocumented paisanos as violent delinquents?

Escalante said his intention was to provoke thought, not to strengthen stereotypes. The film will be seen on both sides of the U.S. border with Mexico, and promises to challenge the two audiences.

Although anti-immigration activists may feel vindicated by the criminal nature of Jesús and Fausto, many people in the U.S. could be concerned by the way Americans in the film treat day laborers in California. Likewise, Mexican viewers might empathize with the persecution of their countrymen abroad, but bristle at the portrayal of the undocumented Mexicans as ultimately violent thugs.

“What I wanted … is that both sides could be offended, not just one,” said Escalante, who knew since he started making movies in his early 20s that he was going to one day focus on immigration.

“I didn’t want to make a movie [in which] the Mexicans had to be completely good,” he said in near perfect English during an interview in Mexico City. Escalante lived in the U.S from the age of 11 to 18. He now resides in Guanajuato, Mexico.

That none of the characters is completely good or bad is what makes the film much more cynical and complex than it first seems. The bleak social background against which the events of the film roll out paints a depressing picture of the daily lives of at least two Americans, too. The day laborers’ victim Karen (played by Nina Zavarin, a professional actress) can barely have a conversation with her teenage son, and hits the crack pipe in the evening to block out her everyday existence.

Throughout the film the viewer has a mounting sense of dread as they observe the abuse Jesús and Fausto endure from U.S. citizens. But whether their crime is a vengeful act, or one for which they’re being paid by a third party (as Karen suspects, at least from her drug-addled perspective) isn’t really the point. Perhaps the point is that everyone in the movie is a victim in some way.

“The movie is about something that stops working, and collapses, for me. I have the theory that when things are not just, or not equal, or not the way they should be naturally, they will explode and some bad things are going to happen. In the movie this is what I wanted to show,” said Escalante.

He does so very graphically, with a feature film that deserves the recognition it has received from a number of festivals including the Morelia International Film Festival (best feature film) and Cannes (Un certain regard).

Whether you love it or hate it, “Los Bastardos” promises to leave an impression that’s hard to shake.

“Los Bastardos” opened in Mexico cinemas last Friday, and is available on DVD in the United States.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City for the Los Angeles Times

Video by Deborah Bonello. All non-interview material courtesy of Mantarraya Productions. With thanks for the Red Tree House for hosting the filming of the interview.

Since then, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Christiane Burkhard, who filmed and directed the documentary, in her Mexico City home. The interview was for the Los Angeles Times, the edited version of which you can see here.

Below is a longer version of the interview with more insights from Burkhard.

– Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

For more recent posts on the working conditions for journalists in Mexico go here.